The thread on Objectivism may have been taking over the conservative/liberal GD, so I decided to start this one to see what people feel about Objectivist thought and writings of Ayn Rand.
To start off, I’ll answer Marc’s queries from the other debate. Certainly, Rand was opposed to the formation of the Libertarian Party in 1971, believing that it was too soon to try (and judging by recent Libertarian Party results, she may have been right). And certainly there is a great divide between Objectivists and Libertarians. However, it’s also rational to say that the libertarian ideology is the best current realization of the Objectivist dream of a free-market.
(Incidentally, the Libertarianz of New Zealand, whom I am much more partial to than the US Libertarians, have somehow managed the impossible and merged Objectivist thinking with practical libertarianism…their site is http://www.libertarianz.org.nz if you care to take a look.
Marc, you also mention the fact about people feeling that they HAVE to be selfish in the pursuit of Objectivism. Dr. Nathaniel Branden, a psychologist/self-esteem expert and close consort of Rand’s until a split in 1969, but still interested in the philosophy, wrote of clients that came in and complained that they were trying to be good Objectivists but just weren’t being selfish enough (in other words, the destructive self-doubt that the whole philosophy was trying to defeat!!!) Certainly Objectivism is about the RAISING of the human spirit and the pursuit of our own personal ideal in life!
Onjectivism, though, is not entirely about being selfish. The title of the book is more an attention-getter than the meat of the philosophy. What she was trying to get accross, IMO, was that selfishness need not always be a vice. And she’s not saying selflessness is bad.
It has been a while but I’m pretty sure Rand’s dislike of the Libertarian party had nothing to do with the date in which it was formed. If I was home I could check out some of my books to find the answer. At any rate Rand said that Objectivism didn’t belong to any single political party. And I would argue that any philosophy didn’t belong or endorse any particular political party.
Marc
That’s because you have to be selfish to follow Objectivist philosophy. Being selfish just means that you take actions that reflect your own system of values.
Unfortunatly many people, including many Objectivist, seem to think that being selfish means not caring about others. But at least under O philosophy that isn’t what it is at all.
The selfishness in Objectivism is RATIONAL selfishness…in fact, self-interest may be a better way in which to describe the general idea. And the idea is like Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand: even though the motivation is the self, others will almost certainly prosper through one’s self interest. Regardless of whether the gain by another is a by-product of a man’s own self-interest (and certainly the man shall prosper as well)…this is quite frankly irrelevant. In altruism, a man gains at the expense of another man, which is the main gap in the thinking.
Speaking as the owner and operator of a fully formed and functional ego please allow me to say this:
The word “selfish” has been smeared with all sorts of perjorative connotations by the altruistic cannibals in this world. There is nothing wrong with the self.
I routinely run into these HR idiots who like to parrot to me, “There is no I in teamwork”. To which I reply, “Oh yes there is, the I stands for Individual excellence, without which no team is very successful.”
Using that same brush, the altruists have similarly tarred the term “self centered”. What in Hades is wrong with basing your outlook on the fact that your entire life goes on within your body?
I would very much like to suggest a term that I use with great success to refer to these negative factors. That term is self absorption. Any jackass that thinks that their world ends at their skin is obviously so blind as to be useless. I have met so many people who decry the self and yet are so wrapped up in their own arbitrary definitions (all too often irrational to boot) of reality as to be laughable.
Ego, self and selfishness do not preclude civility, culture or compassion! It is the lack of rational philosophy that is the root of so many of this world’s evils today. If people behaved consistently with enlightened self interest, there would be an element of enjoyable predictablilty heretofore unknown in modern times.
Please read “Philosophy Who Needs It” and “The New Left, The Anti-Industrial Revolution”, both by Ayn Rand. Top those off with “Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal”, and your outlook may change considerably. Mine did.
Agree. I too heard/read that the title “The Virtue of Selfishness” was chosen for its shock value. Once you read the text, you quickly see that she’s not referring to the negative connotation of “selfishness”.
My reading of the selfish Vs. Self-Centered debate by Rand was that you could do anything YOU wanted.
If you wanted to vounteer and help others because you felt that desire inside, then go do it. But if you felt the need to volunteer because the world expected it of you, then you needed to shake off any claims the world might make of you.
I do not see Rand disparaging kindness as much as dependency and servitude.
Second, what Kimstu said. Rand, a horrendous old battleax, was a deity in her circle; anyone who voiced the slightest dissent got summarily kicked out. She kept Branden (another woman’s husband) on a short leash, too; she could fool around on him, but when he fooled around on her there was hell to pay.
That said, some of her ideas are not without merit, as long as you do as she says and not as she does.
Finally, a real debate (as opposed to our previous semantics)!!!
First of all, I see no fault in “heroic fiction about righteous capitalists”…hell, I wish there was more of it
Pseudo-philosophy…I would certainly like to know what portions of the Objectivist philosophy are incomplete…if one can call nihilism a philosophy, then certainly Objectivism is far more well-defined than that!
Truculent and domineering…perhaps, but sometimes we need a fighter. Incidentally, I’m not a Rand literalist (as in the Ayn Rand Institute)…I believe that the philosophy of Objectivism certainly isn’t perfect and that yes, Ayn Rand made mistakes (gasp!) (for example, her far from free-minded view about homosexuality)…but I also believe that Rand left the groundwork for an excellent philosophy that is free to grow.
Finally…I’d like to meet the adolescent that can fully comprehend the Fountainhead, much less Atlas Shrugged!!! Minds like that are certainly ones I’d like to “ensnare” !!!
The problem was with her epistemology. She hated Kant with a passion I reserve for people who drink pickle juice (j/k) but Kant hit it right on the head with a priori knowledge. I have found an excellent article discussing epistemological problems with objectivism. Check it out: http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~owl/rand.html
Not sure how to use the whole url thing in the boards, so its copy and paste if ya want to read it.
I think the whole guilt-thing Branden tries to bring into it is horse-pucky. Guilt can only be self-inflicted. Knowing that, you find the source of the guilt. Is it because you didn’t live up to a standard you set for yourself? Is it because… and so on. Guilt, like altruism, can only win by default. Once brought into the light it withers like, uh, a vampire (gawd–what a bad simile). While I find Wilson’s “Who is John Guilt?” fomr Illuminatus! very amusing, I do not see that it can really be anything more than a joke. The guilt thing comes into play drastically when people mix rationality for rationalization.
I’m an adolescent. I’m 15, anyway. I read Atlas Shrugged last winter. I thought it was a pretty good book, although I didn’t agree with the ideas all that much. After reading it I looked up some websites on Objectivism, but decided it wasn’t for me and went back to reading Marx.
Just when you think its safe to walk about the SDMB, the horriffic spectre of the Vampire Queen of the Harridans, Ayn Rand, is stalking the Moors again.
When a grape shivels and dries up, it becomes a raisin. When a soul shrivels up, Marxism or Objectivism are two likely results. Both are perfectly rational, and therein lies the failure. The relentless, heartless materialism of Objectivism lends rationale and a shabby intellectual legitimacy to grasping narcissism.
And Ayn Rand, the Borg Queen of Phil 101? A emotional basket case kept alive by influxes of minor fame. Driven from Russia by the Revolution, she developed a hatred of Marxism that bordered on the pathological. (IIRC, she once said in an interview defending her investment in tobacco stocks that the cigarette represents fire, humanity’s power over Nature.) Hence her determination to provide some kind of intellectual underpinning to capitalism, with the grotesque result, Objectivism, as though the rat race somehow nobly leads to the Ubermensch! Hogwash!
I willingly pay attention to a reasonable argument that trade and capitalism provide the best approach to lightening the burden on the poor and downtrodden, but have nothing but contempt for the argument that an altruistic concept of brotherhood is somehow silly and unworthy.
On the one hand, every word she ever wrote, on the other any given two hundred words from the Sermon on the Mount.
Italics added for emphasis.
Altruism and brotherhood are neither silly or unworthy. The degradation of self, ego and identity by abusing the tools of altruism and brotherhood is both.
So many doctrines preach that the self is unworthy and can only realize its value in the service of others. This sort of unadulterated hogwash is what I protest against.
I volunteer and do my best to be a responsible citizen in society, but I am fed up with fundamentalists and other froth-at-the-mouths who try to tell me that I am wrong for believing in the innate goodness of man. The concepts of original sin and the intrinsic unworthiness of man have long been used to yoke the masses to the hidden political agendas of many modern churches.
Throughout history, individual excellence has been met with shrill demands for obeisance to a “higher order”. Too often this has been used to propagate the febrile notion that personal achievement is unattainable without servitude to or compliance with the doctrines of entirely dubious and frequently arbitrary “authorities”.
However harsh Ayn Rand’s mandamus that philosophy be rational may seem to be, such stricture pales in comparison to the uneasy and strident demands for unquestioning belief placed upon so many followers of less clear credos. Too often have those who reasonably insisted upon a degree of logic and accountability been put to the torch for such audacity.
I continually see a willingness to remain unthinking find reward from those who would manipulate and steer the thoughts of many. Such encouragement of heedless conduct and ill thought out mentality is a poisonous insult to the efforts of all people dedicated to enlightenment.
To claim that Marxism is “perfectly rational” is specious at best and ridiculous at least. The voices of untold millions slaughtered in the name of such philosophical chicanery cry out against the intellectual void of so bankrupt a claim.
I’m 19 now, but when I was in the 10th grade about two and 1/2 years ago, I read the Fountainhead. Tne next summer, I stuffed Atlas Shrugged down my throat in a few days of intense reading.
First and foremost, what I enjoyed the most out of those books was the stories that they told. My sister had told me that Ayn Rand had this Objectivist thing. Regardless, I loved the stories, and then after I read them, tried to comprehend the philosophy.
What I wanted to say in this post was that back then, I felt on the verge of something special that I’d love to understand, but I couldn’t find anyone who could help. Cast your net, ensnare me if you will, I’m eager to learn about this topic.
I would be quite happy to "ensnare" you into Objectivist thinking (although the use of words that imply such compulsive thinking usually sickens me).
The most basic tenet of Objectivism is that reality is reality and is not changed by our perception. As they say, A is A, and no amount of philosophical discourse in the world can make A into B.
This leads to the idea of reason in epistemology (the pursuit of knowledge). There are no “supernatural secrets of the universe” and in time man, being the rational “animal” that he is, can figure out all of the answers.
Just because we accept that things are as they are doesn’t necessarily mean that we can’t aspire to become better, which is the basis behind the idea of romanticism in estethic pleasures. Mankind should glorify beauty in our artistic endeavors and reject the ugly and banal. The Fountainhead dealt with this in a particularly apt way; the glorification of the ugly (personified by Toohey and his “chosen” artists, who were producing utter shit) leads to the death of the human spirit.
As rational human beings, self-interest is the motivating ethical force behind Objectivism. Mankind’s greatest achievments are made by people seeking to better themselves. Therefore, the idea of altruism is rejected as once again detrimental to the human spirit. This doesn’t mean that one cannot be charitable, it just means that one must not feel COMPELLED to be charitable. Also, this idea of self-interest means that both parties are usually mutually satisfied and any contract should be of mutual benefit to both parties; in altruistic thinking, benefit to one only comes at the expense of the others (ie, a zero-sum mentality); this is most certainly rejected.
The economic system that best personifies the ideals of Objectivism is capitalism. Rational individuals trading freely among themselves creates the most benefit possible. Governmental controls on trading (a form of altruism) leads to loss of benefit to one party or possibly both (look at the government of Atlas Shrugged as an example of that…especially after the grotesque Directive 10-289 is put into effect)
Well, I’m sure I missed a few points (if any of you other Objectivists would care to elaborate on anything, feel more than free to) but I feel this is a nice, basic introduction to Objectivist philosophy. Hopefully this will whet your appetite a little bit and get you interested in Objectivism…welcome to a new way of thinking :). If you have any other questions, feel free to e-mail me.
